


Ahiṃsā

by AndreyaHalms



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brotherhood, Dealing With Trauma, Gen, Inspired by Eastern Philosphy, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Uchiha Massacre, a story about finding peace and brotherhood, basically Itachi runs off with Sasuke instead of leaving him behind after the massacre, the slash comes towards the fic's end but i tagged it nonetheless
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25221094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreyaHalms/pseuds/AndreyaHalms
Summary: Konoha and his parents are two sides of the same spinning coin. And he, Itachi Uchiha, has chosen which side the coin should face up when it lands.But when he intercepts Sasuke on his way back from school, he makes a new choice.The coup averted and his duty done, he gently reels his baby brother into a whisper-soft genjutsu and disappears into the night.--------------Ahiṃsā: An ancient Indian principle of nonviolence which applies to all living beings, and a key virtue in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Inspired by the premise that all living beings have the spark of the divine spiritual energy; therefore, to hurt another being is to hurt oneself.Note: Updates will be slow. But at any chapter count, this will read like a complete story.
Relationships: Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uzumaki Naruto, Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 15
Kudos: 112





	1. Dhriti: Unswerving Fortitude

_Dhrti or Dhriti (धृति) is defined as the subtle, yet complex, faculty in man that makes him strive continuously towards a goal._

_The Bhagwat Gita defines 3 kinds of Dhritis: the unswerving fortitude with which the individual works towards a noble goal or cause despite obstacles, the situational fortitude displayed to gain short term goals and may dissolve under alternate circumastances, and finally, the stubborness with which one holds on to the false._

_~o~_

“I’m proud of you,” the Sandaime tells him, the weight of his age and decisions visible in each tired wrinkle on his face, on each darkened liver spot on his skin. “It’s a pity it had to come to this. You would have made a fine Hokage one day.”

 _No, I wouldn’t_ , Itachi thinks, head bowed, hands steady, the perfect soldier. He wants to say, _A Konoha led by the Uchiha will have more enemies than allies._

Instead Itachi stands, his hands moving to form the shunshin seals, and flickers off to find the masked Uchiha.

***

“We understand,” his mother tells him. He can’t see her face, but her posture is perfect and her voice doesn't waver. Proud, yet gentle, even as her traitor eldest son, her murderer, stands over her shoulder.

He doesn't know whether he approached his parents from the back to make it easier for himself or for them.

“Just promise me this, Itachi,” his father tells him. The evening breeze carries with it the faint ferric scent of fresh blood. “Take care of Sasuke.”

“I promise,” he says. His breath hitches, his voice wavers. The Sharingan in his eyes _burns_.

“Do not fear for us,” Fugaku says, firm and resolute. Consoling even, in the only way he knows how. “You were always a kind child. Stand by the path you have chosen. Compared to you, our pain will be over in an instant. Even though our philosophies differ, we are proud of you, my son.”

With his face wet and chest heaving with quiet sobs, Itachi raises his sword.

***

The Hokage and the Elders have promised to protect Sasuke, but politics is seldom that easy.

Sasuke is a bright and happy child, untouched yet by the emotions of their clan. As the youngest son of the clan head, he is used to doting and being doted upon, and determined to prove himself. This also leaves him equally open to manipulation by those who want to gain and those who fear the powers of the Sharingan.

Itachi has a plan to guide Sasuke onto the path that will help him reach his own potential and make him untouchable to the likes of Danzo. A plan that will help Sasuke dispel the stigma marking their clan, which goes all the way back to Madara, and his soon-to-be missing-nin brother. A plan that the masked Uchiha agrees is the only way to ensure Sasuke will grow up to be safe and happy.

He intercepts Sasuke on his way back from school. He has a plan, he has the Tsukuyomi, and he has the Curse of Hatred.

He intercepts Sasuke on his way back from school and thinks of Konoha and his parents. Two sides of the same spinning coin, both claiming to be proud of him. Both with their expectations on what he should do for _them_ , both with their war-weary, decades-old disregard for collateral damage and consequences.

(The shinobi world has always been noble enough to put the good of the collective over the happines of single individuals.)

He intercepts Sasuke on his way back from school and lies about killing their clan and killing Shisui and Sasuke's worth. He sees the confusion and terror and rage and pain in his baby brother’s eyes.

(The shinobi world has seldom been kind to its sinless children; the sleeping sunflower-haired newborn their mother had visited in the aftermath of the Kyuubi attack is living proof of that truth.)

Itachi chucks his plan out of the metaphorical window, reels Sasuke into his arms with a whisper-soft genjutsu and disappears into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to write a fic where Itachi fucks off with Sasuke post-massacre to become some sort of a peace-loving warrior monk instead of joining Akatsuki and becoming an international terrorist.
> 
> Inspired by a thread on r/NarutoFanfiction.


	2. Satya: Personal Truths

_Satya (_ _सत्य) refers to the act of being truthful and avoiding the distortion of reality in one’s speech, thoughts or actions._

_Everything is upheld by the truth and everything rests on the truth._

_~o~_

Naruto’s a kid with a lot of dreams. They vary from really big ones with longer planning horizons, to smaller everyday ones. He keeps all of them scratched in a detailed list, safe in the drawers of his ratty apartment to make them look more meaningful. Serious and adult-like. He’s never really believed in the concept of written academics, but he supposes that the old man didn’t get to be the great shinobi he was today by only running around under the perpetually beautiful Konoha skies, come sun or rain.

At the top of the list is this: _I want to become Hokage and make everyone acknowledge me._

He doesn’t know how close he is to becoming Hokage, but he’s terribly excited to realise that he has made good progress with the second part of his most important dream.

With Sasuke Uchiha, no less. His first _friend._

(To be fair, he’d been a little suspicious when the boy had turned towards him instead of away from him after the first day at the Academy, a skewer of dango in each hand.

“Mom got me extra,” Sasuke had explained seriously, holding one out. “She told me if I don’t want it, I can give it to someone who might.”

It happened again the next day. And the day after that. And again and again, a couple of times every week.

Naruto had never really met Sasuke’s mother apart from the occasional glimpse if she would come to collect Sasuke, but anyone who accidentally bought extra snacks for their children on the regular was obviously an awesome parent in Naruto's book.)

Naruto wakes up with a start before the alarm even gets a chance to ring, and throws the covers off himself, practically vibrating with excitement. While Sasuke’s usually too busy studying or hanging out with the gaggle of awestruck children that orbit his presence to give Naruto any time during class, their friendship is a special one built outside Academy hours. Their own personal bubble, away from probing eyes. And today was the day Sasuke had _finally_ promised to show - and (begrudgingly) teach! - him the shurikenjutsu he had been working on.

He lets loose a fistpump and a whoop of joy as he dashes to the Academy.

Strangely enough, Sasuke is not there.

Nor is he there the day after that.

When Sasuke doesn’t turn up for three consecutive days, Naruto catches hold of their teacher when class ends. Iruka makes a strange face when Naruto approaches him, but at least it’s much less uglier than what the other adults make at him.

“Is there anything I can help you with, Naruto?”

Naruto’s questions are a stream, a waterfall. “Where’s Sasuke? Is he sick? He hasn’t been to class in a while. Can I bring him his homework?”

Iruka makes another strange face, a different one. “Sasuke has...moved away to another Village.”

“Moved away?” Naruto yells. “You’re lying! He can’t move away!”

“Naruto, calm down. We’re still inside the Academy.”

“But he can’t move away!” Naruto insists, trying to make Iruka understand. “He would have told me!”

Iruka looks surprised at that. “He would have told you?”

“He would have!” Naruto’s face is hot all over and he can’t feel anything outside of the harsh pounding in his chest. His tears are warm and slick when they stubbornly refuse to stay hidden. His words come out in hiccups and stutters when he tries to explain, “He’s my friend! He would have told me before leaving!”

Iruka raises his hands awkwardly and hesitates as Naruto furiously tries to wipe his stupid snot on his stupid sleeve. Great. Now Iruka is going to scold him for not only being loud and disruptive, but worse, for being a moping crybaby. 

(It’s the only time in his life that he hates the fact that he has someone’s undivided attention.)

Which is why he’s quite surprised when their teacher suddenly kneels down and gently pulls him against his chest. It’s warm and solid and human, and he hates how much he loves it.

Naruto clings to Iruka’s vest and cries for his lost best friend, the first time he allows his disappointment and loneliness to consume him.

(When Naruto will look back to his childhood, he'll think of this moment as the moment when he’d lost his friend but gained something close to a father. It’s a trade he will always wish he didn’t have to make.)

Weeks later in the playground, it’s an uncharacteristically serious Shikamaru who tells him the truth about how Itachi murdered every last Uchiha on a psychotic whim, about how Sasuke’s body had never been found. This is apparently more horrifying than his corpse actually being found. Shikamaru also tells him that he doesn’t know _what_ the adults mean by that, but he wagers it has something to do with the clan’s bloodline limit, the Sharingan.

That night, Naruto takes out his list of dreams and a pencil and edits the first entry on the list.

It says this: _I want to become the Hokage to protect those dear to me._

Under that, he makes a new second entry which deprioritizes everything below it with a factor of one. It’s two words, double-underlined: _Save Sasuke._

***

Itachi flees east towards Wave, and doesn’t stop running till they reach the hidden network of sea caves on the coast. It’s a deep and winding web worming through the cliff face that he had stumbled across a few months earlier, when he had come to clear his head on the way back from a particularly gruesome mission at Kirigakure.

Because Itachi had kept up a steady stream of shunshins with Sasuke secured over his shoulder, he’s left faint from a combination of chakra exhaustion and dehydration by the time he stops. He dries a damp patch on the ground with a breath of heated air and gently lowers his sleeping brother down before collapsing into a messy heap himself.

“Shit,” he curses, the enormity of what he’d done finally catching up with him. _“Shit."_

An overfilled cup, a bulging dam.

A drop.

And then, it all spills over.

(He’d killed- He’d defected- He’d _failed._ )

There’s still time. He can still go back to Konoha and return Sasuke and explain why he had panicked, they will understand-

(But will they?)

-he can promise that he will never be emotionally compromised like that again, a life on the run is no way to for a child to grow up-

(But having his family casually wiped away at the hands of his beloved older brother is?)

-he can promise, he’ll infiltrate Akatsuki as planned, he has always been unwaveringly loyal to Konoha, more than most-

(So had Shisui, and they’d stolen his _eye_ , cornered him and driven him to-

To-)

The sound of wings flapping in the dark distracts him from his agitated spiral and one of his crows settles on his shoulders with a grating coo. He’d summoned five of his crows earlier to cover their tracks and keep watch over and distract any pursuing shinobi. They are a part of a larger singular entity, each bird absolutely identical to the other in all aspects.

(Except the one that carries Shisui’s left eye, the one that has kept watch over Itachi from the high skies ever since the day he had gained his Mangekyou.)

He doesn’t really need to speak to them - their thoughts and emotions are intertwined with his, preferring to communicate through memories and intent, provided they are close enough. Because his crows are essentially a hive mind, communicating with one means communicating with them all. What he finds when he rifles through the crow’s mindscape makes him almost sag in relief.

 _Thank you_ , he tells the bird and scratches its little head. _You are free to leave now, if you’d like._

 _Sure, boss,_ the crows tell him and the one on his shoulder takes flight.

He closes his eyes and measures his breathing, forcing himself to complete step one of the ANBU guide to dealing with trauma.

_Step one: Allow yourself time to experience your emotions. Common emotional responses to trauma are guilt, fear, helplessness, paranoia and hypervigilance._

(He doesn’t have fucking _time_.)

Itachi digs out a fuel pellet from his belt and lights it. The cave flares up in a warm orange glow as he activates his Sharingan and frees Sasuke from his false sleep.

Sasuke sits up and looks around, confused and disoriented. His enquiring gaze falls on Itachi, focusing on a point on his ANBU chest armour. He pauses minutely before scrambling back, eyes swirling into a frantic one-tomoed Sharingan when his back hits the cave wall.

“Sasuke-” Itachi starts, but the younger boy opens his mouth instead.

That is when Itachi realises that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, more _chilling_ than the sound of a small child screaming like an animal. Despair and fury hardens the baby fat in Sasuke’s round cheeks into a terrified rictus, his shrill voice turning hoarse as it echoes in the cave.

(Their parents hadn’t made a sound when he had finally turned his blade on them. 

Mother had gone first, by her request, relieving Itachi of the burden of having to choose. Father after that, as he silently held his dying wife in her last moments.)

_Step one: Allow yourself time to experience your emotions._

Sasuke lunges forward and launches himself at Itachi. He’s much faster than Itachi remembers him being, and distantly, at the back of his head, he allows himself a moment of pride at that, at how much Sasuke’s _grown_ when Itachi had glanced away.

Despite his speed, there’s no finesse to Sasuke’s movements - raw and desperate, designed to hurt both himself and Itachi. Itachi goes along with the hits, redirecting them so that Sasuke doesn’t hurt himself.

He ends up on the ground, Sasuke’s smaller frame pinning him down.

Even if he wanted to dodge, he can’t- he _can’t_.

“You killed them,” Sasuke snarls, voice hoarse from screaming. “You showed me.”

“I did,” Itachi admits.

Sasuke manages to swipe a kunai from Itachi’s belt, taking him by surprise. “You bastard,” he spits, the curse ugly in his small mouth. “I’m going to kill you.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sasuke shrieks in anguish, a second tomoe blooming into existence in each eye, tears running down his face. He places the trembling point of the kunai under Itachi’s chin, breaking through the epidermis. Itachi tenses, ready to intercept. He didn’t come here to die, he didn’t come here to let Sasuke bear the burden of fratricide.

But when Sasuke speaks next, his voice is a choked whisper. “Why?”

Beside them, the fuel pellet sputters and dies, dousing the cave back into darkness. The brothers’ twin red eyes glow almost ethereally in the dark. If Itachi strains his ears, he can hear the sound of waves crashing in the distance.

In another life, they wouldn’t have been here. Itachi would have lied about his intentions and gone on to serve his village from the outside. He would have received his punishment like a blessing in the hands of the only Uchiha _good_ enough to not have dragged their Clan’s name through mud and shit.

And in yet another life, they wouldn’t have been here, the Uchiha wouldn’t have been planning a civil war affecting innocents, the Konoha administration would have a system in place that would respect of one of the founding clans instead of humiliating them, and Itachi and Shisui (and even Father, in the end) wouldn’t have to choose between two different kinds of love.

_Step two: Accept what has happened as an unchangeable fact._

“I had to,” Itachi says. He doesn’t mean for his voice to crack like that, but it does. The only thing that’s keeping his thoughts from slipping away into the ugly recesses of his mind is Sasuke’s weight on his chest and the sting of the trembling kunai as it draws blood. “It was a mission.”

Being a good shinobi doesn’t always mean being a good human being. He’d learnt this the hard way at the age of four, when he had stumbled across his first real enemy on his first real battlefield with his father in the tail end of the War.

_(You were always a kind child.)_

“Why?”

He’s not going to lie to Sasuke. Their world may have fallen apart around them (maybe it had been falling apart long before they even had the misfortune of being born in this godforsaken reality) but he’s not going to try to rebuild it on the nebulous pillars of lies and false oversimplifications. Itachi owes that to himself, the traitor, the butcher.

He owes that to his brother, the beloved younger son, who carries the weight of every molecule of blood Itachi spilt. The only side Itachi has ever truly believed in, not Konoha, not the Uchiha Clan, and frankly, not even himself - the hypocrite pacifist, the unwilling genius shinobi.

 _(I have no desire to engage in a deathmatch with my son,_ Father had said.)

“The Clan was unhappy with the way we were treated,” Itachi says. It’s the first time he’s saying this out loud to an- outsider. “Some shinobi and a majority of civilians feared us because of our bloodline and the fact that we were the police. So they cast the Clan to the sidelines. In return, the Clan wanted to overthrow the Hokage and the Council and install their own leaders. The Sandaime got to know about it-” _I told him about it_ “- and Shisui and I were sent to spy on the Clan. Tensions eventually got to a point where peaceful negotiations were off the table and the Clan’s revolt would lead to bloodshed on both sides. So, it was decided that we- that I-”

Sasuke’s eyes widen as he takes in the warning signs. He scrambles off Itachi just in time as the older boy turns to his side and dry heaves on the floor. He tastes only his bitter bile; there’s no food left in him to come out. Itachi reflexively wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and explains.

“Father’s eyes had a special ability that could potentially level the village. He could destroy hundreds of families and lives and draw the suspicion of the other Hidden Villages.”

Towards the end, when everything started going to shit and Itachi couldn’t trust his own family, after Shisui’s suicide, he had told the Sandaime about Wicked-Eye Fugaku’s Jinchuuriki-controlling Mangekyou too. He faintly wonders now if his patriotism was what drove the final nail in the coffin.

“The Elders would have pressured him into using it. The Hokage and the Council gave me a choice. I could stand by as they went ahead and killed every Uchiha to maintain peace in the Village. Or I could do the job myself and spare you in return. I made my choice.”

“I’m a part of the Clan too. Why would they think you would spare me?”

“I- because you’re my brother, Sasuke,” Itachi says helplessly, spreading his hands. Of all the things he thought Sasuke would ask, _could_ ask, this wasn’t something he was prepared for. How the hell was he supposed to explain that _brother_ held more meaning to Itachi than _clan_ or _mother_ or _father_? Instead, he settles with, “How could I not?”

“But isn’t that why we’re here? So that you can finish the job?”

“No!” Itachi exclaims and Sasuke flinches. Itachi tempers his horror with great difficulty. “Never. Sasuke, I promise you. I will be there for you as long as I’m alive, and even after. Whether you like it or not. Do you understand?”

“Then- Why are we here, then?”

“Because I’m not sure anymore if Konoha will be there for you the way I was promised.”

All the hostility from Sasuke’s face drains off at that, replaced by a blank, empty expression that, despite the chubby cheeks, Itachi unnervingly recognizes from their mother’s final moments.

When Sasuke doesn’t say anything for a long time, Itachi has to ask, even though he dreads the answer. “Do you want to go back to Konoha?”

“Do you?”

_Step three: Rearrange your habits around your trauma for maximum efficiency._

“No.”

Sasuke falls silent once again. Itachi sighs and gets up on unsteady feet. “You can turn off your Sharingan by cutting off the excess chakra to your eyes. I’m going to look for food and water. Follow the seals on the walls to find your way out - they will respond to your presence. Or you can wait for me to come back and take you to Konoha.”

***

Itachi returns half an hour later with some fish strung on a ninja wire, the edible kind of seaweed and a bottle full of potable water he had distilled from the sea. Sasuke is still there in the dark, blank-faced and not having moved an inch. Itachi makes himself busy by gathering some rocks and making a pit before setting up another fire. He wraps the fish in seaweed before skewering them with senbon and settling them over the flame.

The fish is nearly cooked through to the bone when Sasuke speaks up. “Did you really kill Shisui?”

Itachi stills.

(The empty, macabre sockets, the faintest graze of their fingertips, he's slow, too damn _slow_ -)

“No,” he whispers. “It was-”

He’s not going to lie to Sasuke, he’s not going to lie to himself, he’s not, he’s not-

“It’s okay,” Sasuke says. “You don’t have to tell me now. Because I don’t want to go back to Konoha either.”

“Tha-" Itachi croaks. He clears his throat, regains his composure. "Thank you,” he says, and means it.

Sasuke meets his deep gratitude with an even deeper silence.

***

Sasuke doesn’t get a wink of sleep that night. If he closes his eyes, he can see the images of Itachi standing over their parents’ bodies, the scene sickening to the point that he is too scared to even blink.

 _Why did you show it to me,_ he wants to scream, throw a fit, do anything to let the mess of incomprehensible motion and emotion trapped within him escape.

But his joints are locked into the _seiza_ , his words are stuck in his throat, and he _can’t let himself blink._

Sasuke stays awake, listening to his older brother’s sporadic muffled sniffles from where he is lying across the fire. The sound permeates the air and seeps into the ground that supports his shins. He concentrates on the proof of his brother’s grief. It helps him stay awake.

The deepest truth is this: Sasuke loves Itachi. And he feels nothing but hate for the people who have peeled apart his brother’s infallibility and perfection to expose the _ordinary_ boy underneath.

But it's okay, because at the end of the day, Sasuke still loves Itachi.

The next morning, they cover the traces of fire and fishbone, erase the security seals, and venture out of the cave.

Sasuke's exhausted. His eyes feel puffy, sunken and dry. He still doesn’t want to rest.

Itachi’s arms hang limply by his side as he gazes out into the ocean, away from Konoha. His strong shoulders, the ones he would carry Sasuke on, are so much smaller than their father’s. His hands are empty, fragile, untethered. For a brief flash, Sasuke sees dark blood curving around the nail bed and drip-drip-dripping down those fingers.

Sasuke is suddenly stricken with the irrational fear that the sea breeze and noisy seagulls will snatch Itachi’s arms away if Sasuke's not careful enough.

“We’ll have to find a ferry,” Itachi murmurs to himself. “It’s going to be expensive...”

“Do we have money?” Sasuke asks, the first words in so many hours.

“Some. I’ll sell my armour for more.”

Sasuke loves Itachi. If Itachi wants to run, he will be right there by his side. They don't need to have a home or parents to take care of each other.

Sasuke raises his hand and slips it into Itachi’s empty, open, untethered palm. Itachi grips him tight, like a lifeline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this fic anti-Konoha? Nah. Itachi and Sasuke have different personalities - something that's evident if you compare the way each was in canon pre-massacre. And thus, will have (maybe) opposing views not only towards Konoha but life in general. I hope to explore how they will balance each other out in the context of this fic. Their journey has just begun.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Updates will be slow. But at any chapter count, this will read like a complete story.


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